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Monday, 14 September 2015

GROWING UP IN SWAZILAND'S POVERTY

Imagine
you’ve started your first job after a year’s unemployment of endless number of
job applications, after finishing your engineering degree. You are excited, not
least because you have had no source of income while unemployed and because
several of your friends speak of their newly found jobs on Facebook and
LinkedIn, writes Kenworthy News Media.

What you
are met with is an unsigned contract of employment with no job title and no
mention of wage rate or working hours. You receive no introduction to your new
work place. You have to pay for your own tools, and are met with racism, poor
working conditions with multiple accidents and ill-treatment once. Your wages
turn out to be US$10 a day, the same as an unskilled domestic worker.

This is
what 27-year-old Mkhonzeni Dlamini experienced while working as an assistant
electrician for a sawmill company in the small absolute monarchy of Swaziland,
as he outlines in his second book “Delayed Dreams”.

Desperate
for work
Dlamini had studied electrical engineering at the University of Swaziland. He
had grown up in a mud hut in the rural areas of Swaziland, with barely enough
money to eat or to attend school, and he and his family had to make great sacrifices
for him to attend and complete his engineering degree.

With his
degree and job opening, he was now looking forward to being able to support
himself and his family. Both his mother and father are ageing and unemployed
and caring for one’s parents is a burden successful family members have to bear
in Swaziland, says Dlamini.

But after
a month he had nevertheless handed in his resignation. He was fed up with the
racist remarks from management, threats of dismissal for trivial matters and
fellow workers being kicked, slapped and beaten by their seniors.

His
fellow workers stayed on, too desperate for work in a country with over 40 percent
unemployment and where over two thirds of the population survives on under a
dollar a day. “They can be paid peanuts and ill-treated but they won’t complain
since life is too miserable for most of us”, writes Dlamini.

‘We
change but remain unchanged’
“I made changes in life. I saw myself better off than others. But I saw no
change and I remained like everybody. Life is a merry-go round. We change but
remain unchanged”, Dlamini continues.

A short
but highly relevant comment on living in an absolute monarchy, where your
opportunities and place in society are almost fully dependent on your
connections and willingness to comply with the decrees of Swaziland’s absolute
monarch, Mswati III.

“In
Swaziland you can rarely find a company or government parastatal whose board of
directors does not include a prince, princess, chief or the king’s business
associate. We live in an absolute monarchy where the king is above the law”, as
Dlamini puts it.

Don’t
accept defeat
“My stick-and-mud house was no more safe, termites had destroyed most of the
supporting poles on the wall and roof. To avoid the iron sheet from being blown
away by the wind I had placed some old car tyres and bricks on the roof”,
Dlamini says of his present predicament in what is a fitting metaphor of the
state of Mswati’s kingdom.

“Most of
us in Swaziland are subjected to oppression and others have become accustomed
to oppression and no longer express any resistance to it. They have accepted
defeat”, he continues.

Not
Mkhonzeni Dlamini, however. After resigning, he wrote a letter of resignation
that eventually led to several changes in the company he had worked for,
including the introduction of management skill courses, his racist and violent
superior being reprimanded, and the arrival of his final pay check that had
been missing.

And he
wrote a book about his experiences where the last sentence reads “if any man
were to believe in himself and unite with like-minded people, nothing can stand
in his way”.

The
future
For his part, Mkhonzeni Dlamini wants to take a postgraduate degree in
Engineering, depending on whether he can get a scholarship, after which he
wants to work as a consultant engineer and part-time lecturer, he tells me. He
also plans to write several more books in his series about life in Swaziland.

As for
the future of Swaziland, he is less optimistic. “The future of Swaziland is
gloomy, everyday things are getting worse”, he says. Dissenting voices are
therefore on the rise and there is subsequently a real possibility of talks
between the democratic movement and the king.

“But in
my opinion these democracy talks are merely a PR-strategy by the regime. The
prerequisite for such an exercise would be to first unban political parties,
release political prisoners, call for the return of exiles and allow freedom of
speech and association”, says Dlamini.

Read more
about what it is like to grow up below the poverty line in Swaziland, but
succeeding academically against all odds, in Mkhonzeni Dlamini’s first
book, Phoenix
mysteries – memoirs of a born oppressed.